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Records: 1379's Path to the Future
The Royal Academy was at Critical Mass. Not even three years old, 1377-78 had seen phenomenal, magically-driven growth. By early-mid 1379, they achieved an academic phenomena: self-direction. Where Richard and his closest circle had been seeding the major advancements for these scholars to discover and proto-engineers to invent, they were now branching off on their own. The scientific revolution had achieved a self-sustaining reaction. Without a doubt, fueled by the Books' of Learning accelerated literacy, London and Bordeaux were the new cultural centers for science. It wasn't limited to those cities, though, or even the shared office in Angers; there were agents around Europe, recruiting the best and the brightest to bring in and eventually take it back with them. The printing press was having a profound impact all by itself, and in more ways than most expected. The Royal Company wasn't shy about giving credit to the Chinese culture, calling this a "Silk Road Discovery." From the land of spices and silks, the purveyors of magic were promoting the exotic wherever they could. Then there were the first inklings of astronomy branching off from astrology. This was particularly important as astrology was previously respected as a form intelligence gathering and the arrival of actual magic now muddied those waters even more. Finally, there were “procedural” evolutions within the RANP that had the power of revolutions, ways to change the way people thought. 'Full-Steam Ahead' Steam, driving turbines and jacks, had already gone obsolete with the invention of the magically-powered motors. Steam itself, though, was still a hot topic: there were parts of the Royal Academy that were as much an engineering club as anything else. This group kept generous funding as they were the source for "mundane" (non-magical) advances in the understanding of natural philosophies, where every discovery was included and cosoldated into the master text and passed on to students who read the Book of Learning on the subject. By now, with magically-enhanced learning, this group had already achieved a Boyle's Law-level of understanding thermodynamics, playing with concepts like latent heat, building engineering devices like glands to seal rotating parts or vacuum pumps to create pressure (which were not designed to suction away years of a victim's life). This included "pet-projects" like a steam-powered cannon called the Architonnerre. This worked by the sudden influx of hot water into a sealed red hot cannon. The study of pressure, and now gas, grew into pneumatics. Now there was a competing group that created a pneumatic weapon in competition to the water-based cannon. This early version of the Holman Projector was built and fired simply because they could. Most importantly, everything learned from the raw science to engineering was brought back to the arcane-powered engineering. The more efficient they made the mechanics, the less magical power was required, or the more efficient or long-lasting an existing crystal could power a device. Every development led to a tiny, incremental advance – but those advances added up very quickly. 'The Mundane Miracles of the Royal Medical College' The RMC had been founded as a subdivision of the Royal Academy, and it was working with Guild of Surgeons, the medical miracle-workers of the Jesuits and everybody else that could make a contribution. This included the Order of Merlin, and their help was unique in that helped accelerate other aspects of research. Nowhere was that more apparent than the magical filtration of the effects of natural substances upon human beings. This meant the pharmacopea of nature had a review process that happened at the speed of magic. While the usual suspects were plants: leaves, bark, berries and so on, the process had been isolated to particular components and otherwise broadened. Further, after the microbial discoveries, it wasn't just about the benefits to a human system as it was controlling toxic substances, be they poisonous or pathogenic. By 1379, one particular Scotsman in London discovered a substance he called "Penicillin." This mold was itself non-toxic to (most) people, but very effective against most bacterial infections caused by staphylococci and streptococci. While divine magic was already taking the long way around in systemic therapy, seeing the action by which penicillin worked illuminated interactions between human immune systems and substances that could fight infection. This allowed non-divine magic to catch up (by a small degree) to the healing power divine magic. 'Calculating the Incalculable' All of this science and engineering was riding on the tool of math. Behind the scenes, even the non-arcane parts of the RANP were considered Wizards of the Incomprehensible as they'd already switched from Roman to the Arabic-Hindu numerals. Most also used a custom Chinese abacus that allowed lighting fast complex equations. For a little more than a year now, the Royal Academy was holding math competitions and already pushing the boundaries of calculation as theoretical math created postulates as challenges to solve. As both math and the means to use it grew exponentially, there were realizations of problems so complex that they were a practical impossibility to compute (such as: at what point does a pattern appear when calculating Pi?). While there were a few savants with a preternatural grasp of arithmetic, there was no way to reliably check their work or otherwise figure out the processes themselves. This led to a drive to create calculating machines. Well beyond the abacus, there were limitations that both the Royal Treasury and the Royal Company were having in counting and calculating gold flow. Way beyond that, there were questions of magical power that were asking what would go wrong if they didn't follow Prince Rick's steps during alchemy. The answer "nothing good," but to get specific, it took calculations so far beyond their current computational power that they weren't reaching a tenth of a percent. Two realizations in the Order of Merlin there. First: don't screw up the alchemy or you'll wipe England off the map. Second: holy crap, Prince Rick's core group is so far ahead it's not even funny. Trying to calculate the capacity of arcane anchors fell into the same challenge. They were so complex – with potentially hazardous results if it was wrong – that precision calculations were absolutely necessary. RANP scientists and engineers invented mundane mechanical calculators, and by 1379, were equivalent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s 1671 creations. Even these early models were already in a race that would quickly obsolesce each successive model, and based on predictions, this could go for years. At this point, even the mundane calculators had magical assistance on fabrication, creating ever smaller and more exacting parts and tolerances. 'The Magical Calculators' The future of calculation (and everything else) was towards intelligence. That mission-statement manifest a dozen different ways, but the accessibility of magic already took the lead here, too. Where the function of mechanical calculators could be magically copied and compacted into a non-moving, lightweight enchantment, that enchantment could in turn be multiplied over and over into the same spot – with an incredible density of magic on a single carrier point. This was, in effect, magical integrated circuitry – and with sensors and actuators, could already be programmed to automatically control certain processes. The most exciting thing was that between the mundane circuits they magically copied to the sophistication of the enchantments themselves, the growth potential was mind boggling – potentially unlimited. London was well ahead of the game in this respect until the RANP/ROM branch in Bordeaux decided to one-up them. The same arcane principles that carried the information for magical training devices (like Books of Learning), could hold more patterns, and do more, than just store data at a wavelength that could be projected into a human memory. There were crystals that were operating at human-consciousness wavelengths and an experiment was performed to copy a working mind into an arcane crystal. Good news/Bad news: The good news was that it worked. The bad news was that it worked. Did it have a soul? How willful would it be? Would it have a fear of death and a drive for self-preservation? Amidst celebrations, there were already concerns. 'Magical AI' The first crystal to become self-aware was basically a copy of the wizard who'd volunteered to be "scanned." It also had no immediate method of communication, though that was quickly resolved. It knew what it was so there was no awkward questions of identity, though it still retained an imprint of the original wizard's personality. Fortunately for all involved, it felt no pain, and was both curious and introspective (one of the reasons that wizard volunteered in the first place). Like the wizard, the crystal-personality could not perform exceptional math (like the mundane machines in London), but the awareness of physical context essentially made it a magically-based artificial intelligence. It could be transferred between crystals, copied, perhaps even modified... And quickly demonstrated it could learn. The possibilities were endless. 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